How do you role-play as a nomad?

[Treewyrm]

How to roleplay one of 'em?

While reading the lore you'll find out that they are actually have various sub-roles, archetypes. For instance if you decide to base your character background story from being recently awaken you'll likely pick Wanderers, however with it also comes solitude and lengthy journeys across entire Sirius sector. Perhaps yours is cautious one, but may be not. Dig deeper and you'll find plenty to choose from or even mix together to have your own "brew".

Fundamentally the lore acts both as a dictionary and boundary of the roleplay sandbox, so you can express your roleplay through terms and means that are common and understandable both by players having Nomad characters as well as players having human characters. Just like any other faction around inherently plays within a sandbox of archetype associated with it.

Story-wise there are various routes to choose and forms to express it. You've probably gathered already that their story would be quite different compared to others, which is indeed true for various reasons. Generally I would advise to plan your story from the beginning to the end, make a basic layout and define the key moments in the story flow. It is likely you'll have to put emphasis on visual narrative, a kind of storytelling that does a lot of describing the environments, characters and so forth. Quite naturally you can have various parties in your story and tell it from various perspectives, in fact I encourage stories to be like that, as it allows a reader to see the story line from several view points, rather than just having a "flat" type where normally it's just protagonists and supporting characters on the scene at the front. Fill the story with vivid yet vague visions, abstract stuff.

Adding to what Ben just said above I'd like to try to abstract from the common roleplay premises seen throughout the other characters. Namely say your Order character (I don't know if you have one, but just for the sake of example let's assume you do) thinks the Nomads are genocidal aliens and all they want is to kill everyone, however when you take up the role of the Nomad you have abstract from that and start from the blank white paper, apart from the Lore of course. Now a lot of people have mistakenly assumed that all they had to do is to write some sort of angry story about their desire to kill all humans, essentially they put up everything negative they had about them into one basket. So terribly exaggerating and evil-izing them beyond any reason or purpose. That makes me a sad panda, because when you make one like that, take an hour walk and then read what you wrote... you'll realize how silly and absurd it is. So one of the key to success is abstraction from your other characters, approach it from entirely different direction. Because pretty much Freelancer is about shades of gray when it comes to archetypes and morality, and it's no devils - no saints here, no purely black or white. Same here as well. Avoid that mistake.

And if you have related questions don't hesitate to PM them to either Mike (Exile) or me. Don't be afraid share your ideas, if they will be found interesting we'll try to incorporate them into larger picture in some form, but keep in mind that they should be in line with the core concepts in order to avoid contradiction and confusion.